Hills of tea

You can’t forget the tea for long in Coonoor. It surrounds the town, cascading down the mountainsides onto terraced plantations of emerald green. My father always suspected that his grandmother had been a local tea picker. He’s not sure how he came by the impression, but whenever we make Nilgiri tea back home, it’s always steeped in the fanciful notion that we are brewing an ancestral crop.